How to Solve Keyword&nbspCannibalization

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Keyword cannibalization isn't an issue that's in the SEO forums much, nor is it something that many SEOs feature prominently in site reviews (at least, from my experience), but it can be detrimental to potential rankings for several different reasons. First, I'll illustrate how keyword cannibalization happens.

It typically starts when a website's information architecture calls for the targeting of a single term or phrase on multiple pages of the site. Many times this is done unintentionally, but results in several or even dozens of pages that have the same keyword target in the title and header tags. I've heard several clients explain the logic behind this in a similar fashion:

Client: I want Google to know my site is about "Plaid Checkered Pants" so I made that the title of every page.Rand: Really?...

Client: I want people to link to me with "Plaid Checkered Pants" in the anchor text, so I used that on every page. Rand: I see...

Client: I want as many chances as possible to rank well for "Plaid Checkered Pants" so I stuffed it on every page. Rand: Here we go again...

Here's the problem:

Google (and the other search engines) will spider the pages on your site and see 4 (or 40) different pages on the site all seemingly relevant to one particular keyword (in this example - "snowboards"). Contrary to the belief of my three fictitious clients above, Google doesn't interpret this as meaning that your site as a whole is more relevant to "snowboards" or should rank higher than the competition. Instead, it forces Google to choose between the many versions and pick one it feels best fits the query. There's a number of rank-boosting features you lose out on when this happens:

Internal Anchor Text - since you're pointing to so many different pages with the same subject, you can't concentrate the value of internal anchor text on one target.

External Links - If 4 sites link to one page on "snowboards," 3 sites link to another of your "snowboard" pages and 6 sites link to yet another "snowboard" page, you've split up your external link value among three pages, rather than consolidating it into one.

Content Quality - After 3 or 4 pages of writing about the same primary topic, the value of your content is going to suffer. You want the best possible single page to attract links and referrals, not a dozen bland, replicated pages.

Conversion Rate - If one page is converting better than the others, it's a waste to have multiple, lower-converting versions targeting the same traffic. If you want to do conversion tracking, use a multiple-delivery testing system (either A/B or multivariate).

So what's the solution?

The difference in this example is that instead of targeting the singular "snowboards" on every page, the pages are focused on unique, valuable variations and all of them link back to an original, canonical source for the singular term. Google can now easily identify the most relevant page for each of these queries. This isn't just valuable to the search engines; it's also a far better user experience and overall information architecture.

What should you do if you've already got a case of keyword cannibalization? Employ 301's liberally. When working with clients, I like to ID all the pages in the architecture with this issue and determine the best page to point them to, then use a 301 on every cannibalizing page to a single version. This not only ensures that visitors all arrive at the right page, but that the link equity and relevance built up over time is directing the engines to the most relevant and highest-ranking-potential page for the query.

BTW - No making fun of my robot guy. He may not be perfect, but he's the best I can do at midnight. Thanks to Cabanon Press for the robot's inspiration.

Hannibalizing keywords, and page content theory in a more general sense, is something that people seem to misunderstand a lot. And I think the problem comes down to how they approach keyword research. They want to rank no.1 for one single term, rather than going after the thousands of long tail phrases.

In doing so of course, they shoot themselves in the foot.

It all comes down to how many eggs are you happy putting in one basket? One? Five? Ten? A hundred? If the engines changed how they rank sites tomorrow, would you be completely stuffed?

For people who are aiming to rank for only one term, by theming all their content and links to that term, they could well be deep in the poo. But someone who's gone broader, and targetted long tail stuff with deep pages, and using that to bring the overall theme of the domain out, will probably be ok.

I have been standing in the background reading over everyone's shoulders for a few months now, trying to learn as much as I can. I just wanted to say that all of you at SEOMoz are doing a fantastic job explaining a very complex subject in terms that those of us new to the subject are able to understand.

I am working with one very small ecommerce site and I don't think there has been a single day's worth of blogs or articles that has failed to show me a better way to configure the site.

I'd like to second your comment. I'm in basically the same boat (an independent consultant with one primary ecommerce client with some SEO needs), and I've gotten a ton of value on SEOmoz in just a few months. Plus, the community has been great. I only hope to be able give a little more back at some point.

Lisa & Will - As long as you have a targeted page for "Saab" or "Saab London" (or in Will's case "snowboards london") and are linking back to it with the anchor text from the more detailed pages "saab 9-3 convertible" or "discount snowboards london" you should be fine - just like the happy robot picture above shows!

This keyword cannibalization can be very hard to undestood even you u were very clear...

Let's say we have a website with 3 main pages, i'm gonna name them after the example above:

1.Saab

2.Saab 9-3 convertible

and

3.Saab 9-5 Saloon

My question is if i link pages 2 and 3 to 1 using "Saab"anchor text ON ALL THREE PAGES ( a navigation bar situated above all links on every one of those three pages* ) will i avoid keyword cannibalization for the word "Saab"?

*I took into account the fact that google theoretically uses only the first intern link ( in the page ) and ignores the rest if they point to the same target page ... ( basically i'm afraid that the actual navigation bar will "neutralize" the effect of a breadcrumb navigaton used to avoid keyword cannibalization so i'm thinking to use the main navigaton - something that appeares on all pages in the same way - to avoid it ).The difference is that in case of a main navigation those pages are linking reciprocally, not just "linking back to it"

Hope you'll pardon what may be a newbie sort of question, but where does content cannibalization end and content duplication begin? I'll give a for instance that might help explain: I do some ColdFusion development, which tends towards universal headers/footers for sites. It wasn't until a year or two ago that I realized how detrimental this was to search ranking (i.e. having the same TITLE and META tags across an entire site). For example, a client of mine has a content-rich, data-driven site that Google has indexed over 30,000 pages on, yet only 7 pages are shown before we get "...we have omitted some entries very similar...".

Of course, we've given many of the pages unique TITLE tags now, and are starting to populate META description tags, but what I'm trying to understand is if this is just a matter of cannibalizing our own content, or if Google considers this content duplication. I've read Google's comments on duplication, and I have to admit that I'm still confused.

I'm no Rand, but I'd say this probably falls into an entirely different category (which includes aspect of duplication) of content valualisation (I just made that term up - can you tell?)

What I mean is that not only are those pages all very similar looking to the engine (the tags, which you mention) and so appear duplicate, but they are also unlikely to appear to be of much individual value perhaps due to lack of inbound links at a page level etc.. (although this doesn't mean I disagree with Rand's Rising tide theory).

I'm only saying this because we suffer similar problems (despite having unique tags on pretty much every page) and feel that it is due to the engines increased focus on only ranking individual pages with value, rather than all the pages on a site with value.

Obviously, if anyone strongly disagrees with this, I will immediately retract it like the coward I am!

ciaran - I think you've hit the nail on the head, although I would have to investigate the specific example to be sure.

Dr. Pete - I wouldn't worry too much about the pages being in supplemental as long as they're ranking. But, if they're not, you may need to do some investigation into causes - Ciaran's point is a good one.

Thanks, guys. I didn't know if the supplemental listings were a sort of penalty box or not. I've definitely seen improvement in the client's organics since rolling out the unique TITLEs and METAs, although Google seems a lot slower about refreshing its indexes than Yahoo.

Ciaran, I think I see your point about value, and that's probably what's happening. Our pages are getting spidered, but Google is devaluing all of them, since it's having a hard time telling them apart. I'm not sure, though if "valualisation" is going to catch on :)

Thanks, Nathania. Some of these pages are search results that aren't terribly content rich, which is part of the problem. For the more unique pages, though, the custom TITLE tags got us out of the doghouse with Yahoo and I'm hoping the META descriptions will make the Google gods happy.

How can this be true when you have companies optimising for terms like "leather sofa". On Google.co.uk, the #1 result for "leather sofa" is http://www.dfs.co.uk/ (i.e. the homepage). But there's a link on EVERY page of that site to http://www.dfs.co.uk/sofas/leather-sofas/ with anchor text "leather sofas" so surely Google would pay attention to the 9000+ on-site pages indexed referring to that as the most relevant page for leather sofas rather than the 91 off-site pages linking to their homepage with anchor text "leather sofas". Does it disregard the nav menu because it's sitewide - the same way it would disregard a site wide title.There's also approx 224 pages with "leather sofa" in the title or URL on the DFS site. The rules have to be more complex than what you say. Is this only applicable to subpages? Obviously you'd not want your subpages to be considered more relevant for a term you're targeting because the subpage will have much lower PageRank/PA. PageRank has to be a factor. I've seen clients ranking 13, 14, 15 for the same keywords. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your comments. Is there an implication that they'd rank higher if they didn't have pages 14/15? Or just that they've wasted their time when there are other long tail keywords to target?

OK, so I just started out at a company that has a cannibalizing website set up (not as extreme as the example). They target the same phrase on 12 pages, just like the clients you speak with. However, they rank on the first SERP for this phrase and a variation of the phrase (with a space).

Obviously, being the SEO Specialist, I want to do away with this setup, and target this specific phrase on the homepage. Then any variations on other pages. What are the chances that if I do this that their ranking will drop for this phrase? That is not my goal and I don't want to move forward if this might happen.

Rand I'm curious how all this might work for choosing keywords to target on the home page under some situations. I'm thinking of the case of a site that has several sections each focused around a keyword theme, but all of those sections may not fall under one overall theme. Let me give an an example.

A client of mine installs custom fencing. He used to be a carpenter. He only does the fence installs now, but let's pretend he was also offering his carpentry services on the site.

His site then might have two major sections, one for the fences and one for the carpentry, but where would he focus the home page?

Would it be ok to target both the generic carpentry and fencing on the home page? They would naturally be the target of the main pages of their respective sections. Would he target a combination of both words on the home? Or in this case would it be best to target the brand on the home page instead of particular keyword?

By the way the graphics are great. I know they take some time to create and their testing your robot drawing skills, but I think they're adding something to the posts.

I'll typically focus the homepage on both - go after the most general, high-level keywords on the page, then split down and chase the targeted terms on category pages. So, in your example, the home page title tag might be "Carpentry & Custom Fencing" and the subsection would be "Carpentry Services" and "Fencing Services" (or whatever the KW research shows to be most appropriate.

Thanks Rand. That's what I thought, but wasn't 100% sure. My image of building a site around themes is as expected a pyramid. Since that would naturally assume a single point as the top for the home page going after as in 'Carpentry & Custom Fencing' didn't quite reconcile with my image. It seemed more specific than how I was thinking about the main section pages.

I guess under my example I had been seeing the section pages as 'Carpentry' and 'Custom Fencing,' but adding the word services to the section pages was all I needed to reconcile things with the visual.

By the way do you usially prefer using the ampersand in titles as opposed to spelling out the word 'and'? I would think there wouldn't be much difference, though I suppose the 2 less characters would help.

I would appreciate if you could elaborate a bit more since it appears that the home page will not do well for any term -- especially true if the company operates in more verticals in which case the title would be something like "Carpentry, Custom Fencing, Plumbing, Electrical Work"

Furthermore the main page for Carpentry will fail to optimize for the most important term since it will now be optimized for the 2nd most important term (i.e. 'Carpentry Services')

Personally I don't see these two posts as conflicting. Targeting multiple keywords on one page is good (if it matches content and intent) and Rand explains how to decide which keywords to target on separate pages or on the same page. And complementary to that, this post says one should not target the SAME keyword on DIFFERENT pages.

Very succinctly explained, Rand, well done. I agree that this is an all too frequent issue and one that many people have a hard time wrapping their heads around. I guess what they needed was a giant, killer GoogleBot (love it) to illustrate the problem.

I hereby throw down the guantlet and challenge Google to use their vast fortune to build the above portrayed GoogleBot, to be piloted by Matt Cutts at SES San Jose. How friggin' rad would that be?!

My only request is that in the future when you draw all of Google Search including Co-Op/CSE, Image search, Video search, News search, Blog search, etc, that you make the drawing Voltron style. LOL! I'm such an 80's baby. :)

When writing code in an OO manner, the ideal for each class (object) is for it to have one function and perform that function well. Applying that to websites, each page should have a specific function (i.e. snowboards), and be the best page on the site for that function.

Great robot, kind of a Sky Captain influence? (btw, seems like the TinyMCE insert link hasn't been working... not opening up)

I find this a very interesting topic. It would be great to hear/see more, especially any testing... perhaps you should register CannibalSnowboards.com just for this!! Or start a line of snowboards-- that would be a killer name... literally.

This seems like one of those, "ah-ha, that makes perfect sense," topics that is probably far more complex than it appears on the surface. After all, even the better example pages are still about snowboards.

The modifier influence and everything linking back is the key, but that is much clearer in a black and white robotic example. But in reality, everything is gray and not always as easy to pick out.

This is a great example though because looking at things in black and white extremes is the first step to seeing and understanding the bigger picture.

Even easier when the big picture, is a picture ;) so keep the graphics coming.

I have a small ecommerce site, I want to rank my "home page" with keyword "hair clipper", and a blog page with keyword "What kind of hair clipper is good". On the "What kind of hair clipper is good" blog page and almost other pages I have internal link to home page with anchor text "hair clipper" but when I search for hair clipper on Google, the "What kind of hair clipper is good" page is on the SERPs not my home page.

I see loads of comments and valuble information here, I do have a similar issue with my website, which I think is a big issue for me and don't know what to do. Hope some one here can suggest me what to do, here is my website www.bharatdesi.com which is redirected to www.bharatdesi.com/hyderabad for certain resons and initailly i did'nt know what i was doing but when i have come to know it was too late and while googling on net i have found seomoz, hopping there are more experienced people here I decided to write to get some suggestions. I have tageted Hyderabad Classifieds to www.bharatdesi.com/hyderabad which is showing up in the google 2nd page, but when you click on that it will take you to the right classified page, but i have targed another keyword here which is Classifieds in Hyderabad for www.bharatdesi.com/hyderabad/classifieds. Can i have two similar keywords on two different paes like this issue.If not what should i do. Please suggest me what can be the right way.

Interesting points you make. It's an easy mistake to make, so I can see the importance of splitting the pages up and making them specific. It makes total sense that the bots would want specific pages because that's what people want. If someone wants a kid's snowboard they want a page on kid's snowboards not a page generally about snowboards.

Hi, very interesting article. I have a question though.... I am administering a local business website, which provide only one specific service. Therefore I would like to rank only for long tail keywords e.g. "car rental London", "car hire London", "rent a car London". Should I create 3 pages each focusing on one of these spesific keywords or just 1 optimized page for 3 keywords.

Since, these keywords are synonyms, will google consider that I'll have a keyword Canibalism (if I choose, 3 seperate pages)?

I have a line in my SEO scorecard dedicated to category silo's, which is very closely related to what you're talking about here. I think I'll add another line to the scorecard called "keyword cannibalization" now.

It's quite relevant, but on top of that it just sounds cool and I'm sure will elicit some raised eyebrows!

Hi there, This post is really great (thanks Rand!) and it seems very straight-forward to me, but I need help answering a question.

At the moment, I'm creating a website that revolves around images.

My question is; Is it possible and would it be effective to use 301-redirects to point individual image pages (meaning pages that feature one image + description based on a single keyword) to image gallery pages that feature a collection of thumbnails of the images found on those individuals image pages?

If that sounds too confusing, here's an easier way to ask this question; Should/Could 301-redirects be used to point many pages featuring a single picture of a crocodile to a single page featuring many pictures of crocodiles?

Or, depending on how similar content on different pages needs to be for 301-redirects to be effective, would it perhaps be better to point all individual image pages to only one individual image page?

To clarify my goal; I want all searches for "pictures of crocodiles" (and close variations) to lead to a single page, whether that's the crocodiles image gallery page or one of the individual crocodile image pages.

If the 301-redirect is not the appropriate tool for this, would the "Canonical URL Tag" work?

Hi All,
Great post.
But what if your site is thematic - all mainly about one thing.
My wife's blog www.SubwayMusicBlog.com is about her experiences playing music in the subway.
The keywords are "Subway Music" "Busking" "Busker" - which she naturally uses a lot in the course of her writing. So every page (mostly) is essentially about "Subway Music" "Busking" "Busker" - and there are hundreds of pages!
Any advice/ comments on this situation.

I have keyword Z as a link in my global navigation because its general and related to the site.

Problem is that if keyword Z is in the global nav, I can never point more internal links to the page, with varying anchor text, beyond however many pages are in the site (one link per page because its in the global nav.) Is that correct?

I say this with the impression that if there are 2 links per single page, BOTH pointing to the keyword Z page, only the first link (the one in the global nav) will pass the juice...with the second solely for usability.

I am struggling to wrap my mind around how to deal with the issue of pointing more internal links at keyword Z page if its in the global nav ...

Old but still seriously relevant today.Just realized that my many articles on similar topics (market data updates for subdivisions) were cannabilizing the keywords. Haven't slept in days thinking about how to re-engineer the site.

The critical thing I found in this article that I didn't already realize (since I've been reading your book) is LONG TAIL KEYWORDS. I'm analyzing the entire site and will pick long tail keywords to target on the pages so they don't fight with each others.

Thank you to to all the folks who commented to help sort this issue out.

Hi Rand, - My website is rekhta.org and on urdu poetry keyword it is ranking bad and page coming are /cms/about-site page and /poets page and more. I have done linking on urdu poetry keyword to home page but issue is not solved it is not ranking my home page till now. I cannot 301 redirect these pages to home page because these are different pages.

Thanks for the descriptive article, I have a question regarding keyword-cannibalization and maybe if you can guide me to the right direction. I will give you an example

I have a main page for "Healthcare Uniforms" (Main Category) and three child pages "Dental Tunics", "Medical Scrubs" and "Lab Coats" (Child Categories). I have optimized each page with the keywords for the specific category. But as much as I know google uses different words with similar meaning to rank a page as well. So My Medical Scrubs and Dental Tunic pages show "Healthcare uniforms" page in the Search ranking. So is this a case of keyword-cannibalization and should I be optimizing the main category with all the three subcategory keywords.

So today I discovered that one of our clients has multiple landing pages for a keyword they're trying to rank for. I didn't catch it under duplicate content because they varied it enough that my screaming frog audit thought it was chill. But one of the landing pages plummeted from rank 8 to rank 65 and the other moved up to rank 5 as of today. These pages went live October of last year. Is Google selecting one page and sinking the rest as part of their algorithm? Is this normal? Or should I be looking for something in the site architecture?

Hi Rand, Can you plz tell my issue is - My website is rekhta.org and on urdu poetry keyword it is ranking bad and page coming are /cms/about-site page and /poets page and more. I have done linking on urdu poetry keyword to home page but issue is not solved it is not ranking my home page till now . plz suggest

The problem I encounter is that my website sells two types of products: type1 and type 2. The title tag of the home page is "type 1 and type 2" while those page types are respectively "tpe 1" and "type 2".

The problem is on the keyword "type 1" than I want to boost for my home page.

After reading about "cannibalization" i made some changes that had no effects:

* Changes the title of the category page to a synonymous of "type 1" * My baclinks are mostly optimized for that keyword on the home page. Some are on the category page, requests for changes of these are currently on going. * Changing the text of the category page to take into account the synonymous. (except of the balise h1 because it's the name of my category)

I would like your opinion on renaming the category to the synonymous with a change of the URL (301 redirect the home page) so that only the home page is really focused on that keyword, but I am affraid of a loss of weight of this keyword for the website since it will be present elsewhere on the home page (now present in the breadcrumb).

Anyone looking for a more in depth look at keyword cannibalization, along with some tools, techniques and strategies to identify, avoid and recover from it, should take a look at my blog post, "Don't Fall Prey to Keyword Cannibalization - Read This Survival Guide!". Kudos to Rand for inspiring this post.

Hi, what happens then with the meta title of the home page, say we make snowboards and skis and goggles and we will have pages for all these items, which keywords do we have on the home page title, do we repeat them on the home page and then again on each individual page, or should we only target one of the keywords for the home page? many thaks

On a niche or industry site, there will be some topics you may be returning to from time to time to discuss new strategies, news, advancements, etc. For instance, Moz has many articles dedicated to "link building." I can't imagine you craft each article on the topic with specific long tail keyword, so how do you go about avoiding cannibalization in that case?

I too am suffering from keyword cannibalization problems. The issue with my website is that we have main products that are very important. Those products also have various supplies/parts pages. Each of those supplies pages also has the main product name in the title, url, headers, etc. All of the supplies pages do link back to the main product page. The main product pages also have many external backlinks. Still Google sometimes likes to rank those supplies pages instead of the main product page when searching for the name of the main product.

How can I solve this issue? Do I need to remove the product name from the key locations on the supplies pages? Can changing page priorities in my xml sitemap help this situation?

So, just to recap on this great post (as one of my sites is suffering with this). Do I still link from the snowboards page to the kids snowboards page?

In my situation I have 8 pages. One is the homepage company details and a brief insight into what we do. The second most important page is our products (snowboards for example) and then there are 5 detailed (long tail) pages (kids snowboards, trendy snowboards, custom snowboards, etc.) and a contact page.

Each page including the homepage has the same include file for the navigation.

e.g.

home -> index.htm

snowboards -> snowboards.htm

kids snowboards -> kids-snowboards.htm

trendy snowboards -> trendy-snowboards.htm

etc, etc.

contact details -> contact-us.htm

Is this going to cause me problems? Or is what you are saying that the index page only has a link to contact details and the snowboards page. and then the snowboards page links to all of the long tail phrase pages.

Sorry but I'm a little confused as to the correct hierarchy and what pages should have links to each other. Would someone please explain this to me?

I don't agree with what you are saying here about "pants." What rand is saying is that you want each unique page to rank for unique keywords. Which means, "Pants" could be one word, "Blue Pants" could be another, and so fourth. As long as you aren't ranking for the "EXACT" same keywords from one page to another you should be fine. I would be careful about this, however, if a broad google search could match both terms. Then I would say they might be the same keyword, in which case you would then be "cannibalizing yourself."

<quote>I have a client that wants to rank for "engagement rings". They have a site that sells many type of jewelry and the home page has links and text relating to all types of jewelry on their site. The focus though is engagement rings as it is in the title and the first item on the page.

They also have a page/section about engagement rings. With the linking campaign, should we have links to the engagement rings page with the term engagement rings or links to the home page with the term engagement rings. How about linking to both pages randomly with the term engagement rings? I'm looking for a best practice.

Does the home page have a better shot of ranking for that term than an internal page? </quote>

The internal page has as much a chance of ranking as the homepage, it all depends on your internal, external linking and on page optimisation.

From what you've described, it seems logical to have the homepage target jewellery and the inner pages: "engagement rings", "necklaces" etc. as per your keyword research findings.

Moreover, since the keyword Jewellery is very competitive, I would have the homepage target a more specific phrase such as jewellery (location) and the inner pages following suit in order have a better chance of ranking.

I believe the point is that the external links using 'engagement rings' should alll got o the inner page and not the homepage. The home page using the more generic Jewelery/location.company name whatever your generic target is.

Very good advice Rand. I am definitely an offender of multiple keyword and cannabilization of keywords. This definitely gave me a lot to think about and a path to take to make some changes. For that reason I come back to this site. Well, that and awesome graphics in the posts!

This good advice, as usual, and makes good sense. It does lead me to a new question though.

I have a client that wants to rank for "engagement rings". They have a site that sells many type of jewelry and the home page has links and text relating to all types of jewelry on their site. The focus though is engagement rings as it is in the title and the first item on the page. They also have a page/section about engagement rings. With the linking campaign, should we have links to the engagement rings page with the term engagement rings or links to the home page with the term engagement rings. How about linking to both pages randomly with the term engagement rings? I'm looking for a best practice.

Does the home page have a better shot of ranking for that term than an internal page?

I'm running into the "260 Problem" when I try and run a site search right now, but we generally have about 100,000 pages indexed - and unfortunately before my time here someone tried that shotgun approach of getting ALL the pages ranking for the same words.

I've been meaning to implement the strategies you talk about in this post, but the task seems so daunting that I just keep putting it off...

There are ways to automate it a bit if you've got some good developers. You can write rules that basically take text content and do what Wikipedia does - link back all relevant text instances of a phrase to the source page for that phrase (or just the first instance on each page, which I like better).

The way SEOmoz creates Page Titles is to include "SEOmoz |" in every page. Search 'SEOmoz' to see the results on Yahoo! A whopping 629,000 results. This mechanism is valid as it identifies a 'class' of web pages related to a company. Having the letters SEO in the title of every page also helps with SERPs for SEOmoz.

Realtors, sigh.... I don't know why, but they do tend to be the worst clients.

This article has helped alot, on a few of my sites we went with universal headers and footers, like those mentioned above, and after a bit of research I am starting to see how Unbeneficial this 'time-saving' strategy was. DOH, thanks Rand, and back to the drawing board.

Going back to Will's example, what type of content should you have on the global "snowboards London" page so that it does not clash with the niche sub pages underneath? Should it just be kept very generalized? And unique at the same time...!?

Just in case you're still not sure. Yes you should have a content on the home page more generalized but don't forget to target that home page phrase. Deeper pages should target more specific and long tail phrases.

Thank you for the quality information though. I just heard the term "keyword cannibalization" for the first time and went running to find out what it meant. That led me here of course, and now I have a much greater understanding of the concept. I definitely have some corrections to make to my own blog asap, not a problem at all.

Just so am clear, using the example above, when linking back to the main snowboard page - should the anchor text be just "Snowboards" or would you make it more user friendly and have "Back to Snowboards home page" and so long as it has the main keyword phrase in, you'll be sorted?

You should in reality do what you honestly think presents itself and works better for your visitors. If it helps the serps too by utilising some of your keywords in a user friendly way then see that as an added bonus.

This post was helpful but did not touch on one very common cannibalization occurence that happens with product review pages. For example, let's say I have a product page selling a Gillette razor with the title tag and H1 titled: "Men's Gillette Razor, Beefcake 3000" ;-)

Now, let's say I have 50 user-contributed product reviews for that razor on my site and my pagination for reviews pages are search engine friendly, so all pages are getting indexed and cached regularly. So, ultimately I now have 5 pages, each with 10 reviews per page, all ranking for the same phrase and using the same title tag (with maybe a Page 2, Page 3, etc. added to the title).

How does one solve this issue exactly without having to manually rename thousands of product page titles and come up with title tags and H1's that are all unique on each reviews page? Would it be sufficient to just link prominently back to the main product page from those extra 5 pages?

Many years later and i still feel like this deserves a reply...just incase you are still (and i highly doubt it) bashing your head against a wall on this one and more importantly for newbie SEO's out there reading this...and it gives me a chance to make a first post ;)

Now we have the wonderfulness of the canonical tag! Making your main product page the canonical url in this instance will solve much of your problem as to which page the search engines (Google) will rank for your desired term.

I made this very mistake but site wide. I mean every page.. I have over 100 articles with similar if not identical headers. Thanks for pointing this out Rand! I now have A LOT of work to do...btw..Day one on Seomoz and I have learned more factual info than the past 6 months of browsing for seo content on the web.

Once I fix the keywords in the headers of each article how long will it take Google to crawl and boost my seo score? Thanks guys

OK, So I admit also, I have cannibalized several sites and this may explain why I have had a hard time getting a few sites ranked well. So is the only solution to employ 301's? Changing the keyword structure on the pages won'w work?